


Ambivalence

by kuppatan



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics), Red Robin (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics), Young Justice (Comics)
Genre: Character Study, No editing we die like mne, Post-Red Robin 26, Suicidal Thoughts, its real full of, kind of, more like a meh approach to death, teen angst(tm), what is the canon timeline? we just dont know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-06 03:17:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17337587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuppatan/pseuds/kuppatan
Summary: Tim Drake can't say wants to die but he can't really say he's looking forward to living, if you catch his drift.





	Ambivalence

**Author's Note:**

> tim drake after RR 26, thinkin about his life (he's brooding, let's be real)

Tim Drake couldn’t regret being alive.

Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate. There were times, many times, where he hated his life. He could recall many times in his earlier career where he landed in literal garbage and thought, “Man, I hate my life.” It was sarcastic, for the most part. It was funny, poking fun at his own life while he was down in the dumps. When he started losing family and friends- well, it became slightly less sarcastic.

But, he can’t regret being alive.

Not when he saves lives and helps people. Growing up with Batman and Robin for role models gave him pretty solid values if nothing else. Helping people is good. People make a difference. He made a difference. He stopped Batman from going off the rails. He saved Batman from the Scarecrow. He led a team of heroes. He found Bruce.

So, yeah, he doesn’t regret being alive, but-

When he sees his death looming over his shoulder like so many of his teammates and his family, it feels comforting. It feels like an inevitability. It’s a certainty etched in stone. Everyone dies eventually.

He can’t say, honestly, that he wants to die at twenty, but, really, he can’t say, honestly, that he wants to live past twenty. 

Tim has two wills written in his computer like the rest of his family. You can’t really predict when you’re going to die. In spite of that, he still has guesses. His calendar is full of marked dates passed. Heroes tend to have a short expiration date. They also tend to bounce back; still, more heroes die than come back. He has his hopes about which side he’ll be on after the time comes.

Being seventeen feels old.

He has a corporate job, which is probably more than he expected for himself when he was thirteen. He’s a CEO, which certainly more than he expected for himself when he was thirteen. At fifteen, Tim was pretty sure the possibility of him being a CEO died once Drake Industries merged into Wayne Tech. Well, his predictions always tended to be off in personal matters.

He’s almost eighteen. He’s lived almost two years more than Jason Todd in his original form. Eighteen years out of twenty was 90% of his (predicted) life span past. Most of his original team, Young Justice, were out of the hero business. Cissie was training for the Olympics. Secret, Greta, was studying in college. Slobo died pretty much when the team disbanded. Empress was taking care of her parents. Kon, Cassie, and Bart were still around. That said, both Kon and Bart died, but they came back, so it was fine. It was fine. Steph did the same thing later on. He supposes it’s good that he got practice with friends dying early on. At least, he didn’t try to clone Steph back to life.

Living is exhausting.

Life had given back some of what it’d taken. Kon. Bart. Steph. Dick. Bruce. Sometimes, it felt like heroes had a better mortality rate than the civilians around him. Perhaps it was because more them faked their deaths. Tim was grateful to the friends and family he had back. Despite all the wonderful returns, the addition of another family really put his life in a spiral.

The introduction of Damian into his life was...well. It all went downhill after he tried offering the kid a handshake to put it shortly. The longer explanation is that Damian tried to kill him by pushing him off the giant dinosaur in the Batcave. It would’ve been a stupid way to die if he did, especially since he was in costume. Not to be upstaged, later, Tim tried to murder Damian because he thought he murdered Alfred. In his defense, Damian was a murderous little brat. So, yeah, he tried to kill Damian once, which, if he was being generous, excused Damian’s first murder attempt. It didn’t, however, excuse the several following ones. 

It didn’t matter in the end.

It turned out Damian didn’t need to kill Tim to become Robin. Everyone just needed to think Bruce was dead. That still burned despite Tim’s best attempts to quell the resentment.

The worst bit of it was, after Tim’s little world journey, Damian actually became a better person. The better person version of Damian still tried to kill him, once, but he was still the bad guy for putting the brat on list of people dangerous to society. Go him for hurting the eleven year old’s feelings. 

Bruce was co-CEO’s with him now. He had a sneaking suspicion that Bruce didn’t retake his position as full CEO despite his controlling tendencies because it would hurt Tim’s feelings and all the paperwork. Lucius still did most of the paperwork between them. Bruce’s defense to this was he was publicly stupid. Tim’s defense was he was seventeen and he’d never taken a single class in business or economics. Still, he did some CEO work because shoving all of the work on Lucius made him feel like garbage and Tam glared at him when he slacked on his work too hard. 

While Tim was grateful to Bruce for not invaliding him out of the Wayne family by forcing him out of the company, he didn’t like business. He wasn’t into it when he was thirteen and he didn’t like it anymore now that he was seventeen. He’d love to just have Robin back and move into a Damian-less Wayne Mansion; however, that was happening approximately never, so he’d deal with the hand dealt to him. 

It’s become abundantly clear to him in the time after he’s planned the death of Captain Boomerang that his place in the family is shaky. Its stability is no doubt helped by his harsh pursuit of the people on his Hit List. If Bruce hasn’t ordered Oracle to give him the list already, he’d eat his own fake goldfish in his aquarium. Bruce thinks he’s going to kill one of the people he’s after one day. Tim can’t help but feel offended that, after stopping the death of his father’s murderer, Bruce thinks he’s going to kill someone.

It’s not fine; he can admit that to himself. He’s not fine; he can admit that to himself.

But it’s not like he has that long left. He can live with it. Seventeen years old: he’s practically on his deathbed.


End file.
